Analysis: Billie Jean

Billie jean is an artist who lives and work in Leytonstone in east london. I found it hard looking for information about Billie jean and when I did find some information it was a short paragraph written by someone i guess that is a close friend to Jean because of how the person described Jean. From this short bio I imagine Jean to be a childish, fun, happy and funny man. In his bio the person talks about fun irrelevant random subjects/ facts about Jean such as; He enjoys climbing trees, idling the hours away in second-hand bookshops, drinking 'Blue Vanilla' flavoured Slush Puppies, making chocolate rice crispy cup cakes, knitting tea cosies and oh yes, drawing with great skill. Even though this bio is random and  quite irrelevant I feel that it really reflects his work because of how his drawing is very playful and fun. 

This is a piece of artwork (above) that Billie Jean created for Nike to go in their shop window to celebrate 30 years of nike shoes and too advertise a new style of shoe that they where selling. I really like this piece of artwork because of all the borrow doodles that are compacted on to the graph paper. I feel that the piece works well in the shop window because of how the drawn nike shoe is the main focus on the graph paper. Jean uses the borrow to also make certain parts and doodles on the page much bolder and stand out more on the page. I have noticed that the bolder images on the page are the parts that relate most to the shoe and the light thinner lines in the background are doodles and mark makings that are there to fill in the background and also make the more relevant objects stand out. 

I feel that this piece of work is targeted at teenage audience because of the fun abstract doodles used on the paper. The way the big piece of artwork is placed on the wall in the window to advertise reminds me a lot of graffiti and doodles people might make on school desks which teenagers could relate to. Also graph paper is used a lot in school for maths and other subjects and when teenage and young people get bored in school they tend to doodle and get distracted so the doodles for this artwork work really well on the graph paper. I feel that Jean is trying to also show a message to young people that doodles that you do on your books that you could get in trouble with in school can actual be really nice pieces of work and some teenagers might look at the work in the shop window and feel that the doodles they make are as good as his work. 

I was then looking through Billie jeans portfolio and found these two other doodled sketches that are in books instead of a more professional layout or advertising in a shop window. These two designs were designed for VolksWagen for their website. I really like the layout of these doodles because of how they are in normal sketchbooks and how they are on brown scratched desk with other small doodles on the desk. The books being on the desk show how these doodles could of been done in a school and thats why I feel even though these designs are for advertising cars for adults, these designs can be targeted at younger children and teenagers to inspire them to think more when just creating a random doodle.

Not only has Billie jean done doodle work on plain or graphed paper for advertising, he has also done some moving image work, designed packaging, typography and Jean has also created his own shoe. You can check all Billie Jeans work out on a website called agencyrush.com or on his website billiejean.co.uk.